Maria PRYMACHENKO — the Ukrainian artist that made Picasso bow down
Disclaimer: The information provided in this episode comes from multiple sources and is not my scientific studies or discoveries. Check the references for more details. Thank you! Scroll down for the Romanian episode.
Welcome to HerArt podcast, a project for art lovers, especially art created by women. In this episode, we will talk about Maria PRYMACHENKO — the Ukrainian artist that made Picasso bow down. My name is Nata Andreev and I am going to tell you seven curious facts that you didn’t know about the unique art of Maria Primachenko, a peasant woman from the Kievan village of Bolotnia, shows a successful blend of natural talent, an overwhelming desire to create beauty and a sensitive perception of reality. The complex world of her images springs both from her own imagination and from the entire system and content of Ukrainian folk poetry.
Curious Fact #1
Іn her childhood Maria was taken ill with polio, and this painful disease influenced the girl’s life. She grew а thoughtful and considerate person, having compassion for nature and every living thing.
Curious Fact #2
Images often had арреаred to the artist in dreams and later materialized in her compositions. Maria Pryimachenko’s artworks depict fabulous mythological beasts and take their roots іn folk legends and fairy-tales, nourished bу real life and culture of the Ukrainian реорlе.
Curious Fact #3
There are no professional secrets in Maria’s arsenal: she paints on Whatman paper with factory-manufactured brushes and uses gouache and watercolors. She prefers gouache which gives a bright and thick decorative base with graphic contours. Apart from searches in color scheme, the artist strives to achieve expressive outlines and an effective rhythmical arrangement.
Curious Fact #4
Picasso once said after visiting a Primachenko exhibition in Paris, “I bow down before the artistic miracle of this brilliant Ukrainian.” Maria Primachenko is an Honored Artist of Ukraine and a Taras Shevchenko Prize Winner.
Curious Fact #5
Though Primachenko has never studied art, her pictorial flair for bringing to life ideas, feelings and impressions gradually ripened into true mastery. Exhibitions of her works have proved tremendously popular in Moscow, Poland, Bulgaria, France, and Canada.
Curious Fact #6
The world of Maria Pryimachenko is primarily mythological and zoological. However, what kind of mythology are we talking about? It is unlikely to find matches of the beast in embroidery, weaving, decorative painting interiors of buildings in the region of Kyiv-Polissia.
Curious Fact #7
Since the 1960s, when interest in her paintings in artistic circles in Kyiv not only returned but turned into a constant support and communication material, she found the strength not only to create “large format” and in an intensive colored background. The widow, who survived the occupation, the shooting of her brother, a lonely upbringing of a son, twenty years of artistic silence, devotes herself to drawing as a possibility in disguised form “decorative”, something subjective. In national flower, symbolism is not just a decoration. Pryimachenko knows it because during her life she wore embroidered shirts not for show, but for every day.
Thank you so much for listening to the fourth episode of HerArt podcast — a project for art lovers, especially art created by women. If you want to follow more of what we do, find us on Facebook and Instagram. And don’t forget to tune in next month, when I am going to tell you about Georgia O’KEEFFE — one of the best painters. Period.
See you!
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